This review contains fundamental spoilers – including the ending of the film.
Unfortunately, two extremely appealing fan fiction theories about the possible ending of “Disclosure Day” have not come true. That’s why it’s not a spoiler to lay them out here. Variant one: Richard Dreyfuss, who boarded the alien spaceship in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” almost 50 years ago, returns to earth at the end of Steven Spielberg’s new work and bears witness. Variant two: Spielberg had exclusive insight into the Pentagon’s recently published UFO files and presented recordings of aliens for the first time with official government approval. That would be something!
The real plot of “Disclosure Day” is more sober: The aliens teach us that empathy ensures world peace because it lies dormant in every human being. Also in Americans and Russians. The bloc powers are tumbling towards World War III, the USA and Russia have aimed their strategic nuclear warheads at each other. Only empathy can appease humanity. The news anchor Margaret Fairchild (played by Emily Blunt – why did author David Koepp name her so that one always has to think of Morgan Fairchild?) does her job in Kansas City, the “The Day After” metropolis that symbolized nuclear Armageddon in 1983.
Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) is a cybersecurity specialist who an organization is hunting because they want to prevent him from leaking secret Roswell knowledge online. Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) leads “Wardex,” a conspiratorial circle that oversees the preservation of state secrets.
“They don’t belong to the government – they make their money with lies,” says Kellner, revealing more about his view of the current administration than about the fictitious institution that will kill people if necessary. “You can’t just publish that,” counters his friend Jane (Eve Hewson), a former nun. “The world is on the brink anyway – what do you think will happen then?” “I don’t decide whether this data is good or bad,” he replies. “I just think they need to be exposed.” A plea for whistleblowing government secrets, also the maxim of WikiLeaks, regardless of the fact that US presidents are supposedly not privy to the UFO secrets, after eight years at the latest they are simply civilians again.
Roswell, secrets and questions of conscience
In a theological presumption, Jane even has her former nun confirm that God only created man on earth in his own image; An image in other galaxies is by no means ruled out. This film, which like Spielberg’s “Sugarland Express” is a persecution drama on wheels, doesn’t need a religious perspective.
Perhaps David Koepp, whom Spielberg commissioned as an action specialist specifically for the project, is not the luckiest choice for this task either. In his best works, literary adaptations such as “Jurassic Park” and “Carlito’s Way” are balanced with original screenplays such as “Panic Room” or “Mission: Impossible”. But these were all genre pieces.
The journalist Fairchild and the whistleblower Kellner embody the best virtues of America in Spielberg and Koepp’s very idealistic sci-fi thriller – an idea that at least seems refreshing given the world situation. Moderator Fairchild is literally a medium, one through which even the extraterrestrial visitors speak to us. The fact that extraterrestrials, of all things, are urging us to be at peace, instead of their arrival causing humanity to panic and drive us to the brink of nuclear suicide, seems, on the other hand, sincere.
The hope for salvation from outside
The trailers for “Disclosure Day” are extremely clumsy, as they give away the entire film; Apart from that, the question arises as to why Steven Spielberg was able to resurrect deceptively real dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park” 33 years ago, only to show forest animals that look like characters from a Pixar film today, three decades later.
Extraterrestrials are Spielberg’s life theme, and he has also only slightly modified the shape of the aliens, naked, delicate creatures with egg skulls and almond-shaped eyes, for almost 50 years: from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” to “War of the Worlds” and “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” to “AI – Artificial Intelligence”, in which even the robots at the end of mecha-evolutionary development look like apparitions from one another Area 51 nightmare. In “Disclosure Day,” Spielberg turns his back on the martial, pulpy Wells idea of warlike aliens from “War of the Worlds” and turns to a presumably more plausible hard sci-fi, in the spirit of Arthur C. Clarke: If aliens actually stop by, then probably only with peaceful intentions.
Some ideas are successful, such as the casting of Wyatt Russell as Fairchild’s boyfriend, who we have already seen in a duel with a “being” in the bitterly evil “Black Mirror” episode “Playtest” and who, with his rock-solid conviction of masculinity, behind which in reality lurks complete helplessness, appears just as amusing as his father Kurt in “Big Trouble in Little China”. There is also a tracking shot through a hectic TV studio – which is rather untypical for Spielberg. And finally that rare moment of real Spielberg magic: the idea of alleviating one of Fairchild’s panic attacks by touching sound bodies.
Spielberg’s old obsession
Speaking of magic: you would have to go back to 1998 to find the last Spielberg film that had any cultural significance. “Saving Private Ryan” is now 28 years ago, the film that felt like war – so much so that World War II veterans left the theaters crying.
This was followed by a number of strong works: the still highly topical question of whether artificial intelligence can sense (“AI”, the title topic of which John Williams paraphrases for the “Disclosure Day” credits); the at least technically astonishing screen-wiping thriller “Minority Report”; with “War of the Worlds” an examination of 9/11 and the fear of the sleeper; as well as “Munich”, a masterpiece that weighs up questions of guilt between Israelis and Palestinians in such a balanced way that it should be a must for all those who only shout at each other in this debate.
But even these works – “AI”, “Minority Report”, “War of the Worlds” and “Munich” – ultimately do not resonate sustainably, whether you like it or not. “Disclosure Day”, like the “Tintin” film or “Ready Player One” and “The Fablemans”, is one of those later Spielberg works that looks great but offers no reason to see it again. His “West Side Story” film adaptation from 2021, which quite a few critics consider to be more successful than Robert Wise’s version from 1961 simply because of its more precise ethnic casting, is kept in conversation today solely by the praises of Quentin Tarantino.
So 28 years. That’s half of Spielberg’s directing career. 28 years in which he made films that had less and less influence on film culture and public debate. Sergio Leone shot his entire work in less than this time. Christopher Nolan is currently 28 years old.
Where’s the punchline?
In Disclosure Day, Spielberg claims that a UFO actually landed in Roswell (be sure to read investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen’s extremely worthwhile research, according to which the Roswell UFO was piloted by deformed children bred by Josef Mengele – on behalf of Josef Stalin, who wanted to terrify the American people. Yes, that sounds completely unbelievable, but the research is terrific). Spielberg shows CGI aliens at crash sites and in laboratories. However, he doesn’t tell a real story about it. This revelation is already its punchline, which the film moves towards in the last 15 minutes. Already in the middle of the film, Whistleblower Kellner shows photos of aliens, which are no longer surpassed by the images at the end. It remains incomprehensible how Spielberg could have thought that he would be able to impress the audience with this in the finale.
The more interesting story would have been: Roswell was a hoax, but the realization that we are on our own in the universe forces humanity to pull itself together. But the funeral of one of her biggest dreams – contact with extraterrestrials – wouldn’t be typical Spielberg material. Plus there would be less reason for him to take those emotional reaction shots he loves so much. Instead, “Disclosure Day” confirms the conspiracy storytellers: They were right all along.
How low must Spielberg’s trust in man’s ability to correct himself be if he lets aliens dictate what we need to change about ourselves?